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The four-inch wax cylinders heard on this album were rerecorded onto magnetic tape using a modified Edison Home Phonograph. The machine accepted styluses varying in size to accommodate the different size and condition of each cylinder. Because the revolutions per minute at which these field recordings were made often changed from day to day, sometimes from cylinder to cylinder, the technician rerecording them decided ...

Omaha Indian Informant and Alice Fletcher in Macy, NE. Courtesy of the National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution. Photograph No. 4500. In the late 19th century, American Indian music was emerging as a legitimate area of anthropological inquiry. Most fieldworkers noted only the words of ceremonial songs and found Indian music at best difficult to comprehend. In her introduction to A Study of Omaha Indian ...

Omaha reservation, Thurston County, Nebraska. By the time Alice Fletcher first began her study of Omaha culture in the early 1880s, much of the original land belonging to the Dhegiha Siouan-speaking Omaha people had been ceded to the United States through treaty. The Omaha cylinder recordings at the Library of Congress were not really thought about by the Omaha during the last century. They ...

Clockwise from top: Looking Toward Macy from Pow-Wow; Baseball Game in Macy; View of Bluffs, Missouri River, and Iowa. There are no more deer hoof rattles. The moccasin game exists only in memory. All that remains of the Warrior Society is the American Legion. The medicine bundles have been stolen, sold, or destroyed. The sacred Pole is gone. The last monolingual Omaha has died. ...

Presented here are selections from the American Folklife Center's collections documenting Omaha music traditions. The sound recordings include 44 wax cylinder recordings made in the 1890s (first published on a 1985 LP entitled Omaha Indian Music: Historical Recordings from the Fletcher/La Flesche Collection), 323 songs and spoken-word segments from the 1983 Omaha harvest celebration pow-wow, 24 spoken-word segments from an interview with an Omaha ...